


Chasing Nightmares

by probablynothumanish



Category: Sanders Sides (Web Series)
Genre: Dreams, Human AU, Human Sides, Insomnia, M/M, Parent Death, Soulmate AU, Soulmates, and logince is as well, avoidance to lovers, but its still there, crossposted, crossposted on tumblr, death mention, dreamscape, intruxiety - Freeform, moceit is very much in the background, reluctance to lovers, remus is an acting major, remus wants to be a stuntman, theres a constant dreamscape, virgil has gay dads, virgil is an art major, virgil wants to do character design, virgils birth mom died in labor
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-31
Updated: 2021-02-07
Packaged: 2021-03-17 18:21:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,694
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29104719
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/probablynothumanish/pseuds/probablynothumanish
Summary: In a world where you get to see and speak with your soulmate in a shared dreamscape, Virgil Harper tries very hard not to sleep. Growing up in a household in which soulmates are a touchy subject, he grew to resent the very idea of them. But it's kind of hard to avoid his when he sees him in his sleep every night.
Relationships: Creativity | Remus Sanders / Anxiety | Virgil Sanders, Creativity | Roman Sanders / Logic | Logan Sanders, Deceit | Janus Sanders / Morality | Patton Sanders
Comments: 9
Kudos: 43





	1. Chapter 1

Virgil Harper hated the idea of soulmates. To him, it seemed like such a pointless thing. Why would fate give someone the chance to “be happy” when everything could come crashing down around them at any given moment? Maybe if things had been different for his parents, he would have thought differently. Or his grandparents. Or his aunts and uncles. Any of his family, really.   
Virgil had come from a long line of really shitty luck.   
Luck, or fate, or whatever you wanted to call it.   
It didn’t really matter either way. It was a stupid, pointless thing.   
There was no such thing in life as certainty. There were people whose soulmates were their perfect fit, and they lived happily ever after. There were people whose soulmates were a wrong fit and they couldn’t stand each other because they were too different or too similar. There were people who didn’t end up having a soulmate at all.   
One of Virgil’s dads didn’t have a soulmate.   
He had hoped and dreamed his entire life, waiting to see his soulmate in his dreams - any dream, really. He napped throughout the day in case they were in a different time zone, he meditated and learned to lucid dream. But still nothing.   
Virgil’s papa, on the other hand, had had a soulmate. At one point. Doing some snooping through old journals and such in the attic, Virgil had learned that his papa had spent high school and college with his soulmate, even gotten engaged to her, only for her to die giving birth. The doctors had said that her body just wasn’t “made for having children”.   
Pity they hadn’t figured that out sooner.  
Virgil was the product of tragedy in any way he tried to look at it.   
Soulmates, he thought, were a stupid, pointless thing.   
His dads didn’t talk about them. He had learned about them through his best friend, Patton, during third grade or so. He had been sitting in art class, happily scribbling on a coloring page he had been given after defiantly refusing to draw a lifelike animal like the rest of the class, when ahe had brought up the subject to Virgil. “I saw my soulmate last night, Virgie!”  
“Your… soulmate? What’s that?”  
“My mama told me about them! She said that when I got to be a big boy, I would see them in my dreams at night and get to talk to them.”  
“How come?”  
“Mama says it’s God giving you a chance at real happiness!”  
“But… why?”  
Patton turned to look at Virgil and scrunched his brows together on his forehead. “Did your dads not tell you about soulmates?”  
It was such an innocent question, but it made Virgil’s stomach ache. Why hadn’t his dads told him? Did they not trust him?  
He asked them when he got home. Sitting at the dinner table, he asked as casually as an eight-year-old child can ask, “Hey papa, dad, what are soulmates?”  
All sound in the dining room stopped at that exact second. His dads exchanged looks across the table, forks suspended in midair, not daring to move. His papa was the first to speak. “Soulmates are supposed to be the person that fate wants you to spend your life with, Virgil.”   
“Are you two soulmates?” he asked, glad that they were actually talking about it with him. He had expected them to shut him down instantly.   
“Well, no,” his dad said. “Just because it’s who fate wants you to be with, doesn’t mean that it always works out, kiddo. Remember what we taught you about taking fate into your own hands?” He nodded. “Well, it’s the same thing. You can’t just rely on fairytales to get you where you want to be in life. You gotta make your own choices.”  
The house was silent for the rest of the evening.   
Virgil spent his childhood actively avoiding any person he saw in his dreams. He learned to lucid dream by the time he was twelve, and he focused all his mental energy into making sure that he left the dreamscape every time he even came close to seeing a person. And he switched around his sleeping schedule so that it wouldn’t even be a problem.   
He asked his dads when he got to high school if he could be homeschooled, and they enrolled him in an online school. He was able to do most of his classwork at night. He would attend the video classes between ten and noon, and then he would sleep until eight at night and would pick up his classwork for the day.   
Things were working out for him for a while.   
Until they stopped.  
Virgil’s papa lost his job during Virgil’s senior year, and they couldn’t afford the online schooling anymore. And with the job hunt and Virgil’s dad taking up extra hours to cover the loss in income, they didn’t have the time to homeschool him themselves. And so Virgil went back to public school. And he went back to sleeping at night.  
And the very first night, as soon as he faded into the dreamscape he had grown so familiar with, he heard it.  
“Hello.”  
Fuck.


	2. Chapter 2

Remus Avery spent their entire childhood - from age eleven to now, age nineteen - desperately seeking out his soulmate. They knew that they were out there. They had seen them in passing a few times, only for them to disappear from the dreamscape they shared. So they knew they weren’t one of the rare few who didn’t have a soulmate at all.   
And so they waited. They waited to see when they would see their soulmate again. They waited to hear an unknown yet strangely familiar voice in their dreams. They waited and waited and hoped beyond hope that something horrible hadn’t happened to their soulmate.   
By the time they graduated senior year, they had all but given up hope that they were ever going to see them again. So when out of the blue one day, a cute boy with violet hair showed up - that they could have sworn they’d seen somewhere before - Remus’s heart soared.   
Finally.  
Someone who would love them.  
“Hello,” they greeted, not sure what else to say to the person they were supposed to spend forever with.   
The boy turned to them with wide eyes - Jesus fuck, they were beautiful. One was a nearly violet shade of blue, while the other was a brilliant shade of green. He froze when he looked at Remus, panic flashing across his face. “Shit, it’s you, isn’t it?” he blurted out after a second, and any hope Remus had had faded in an instant.  
This boy wasn’t going to love them.  
Wasn’t going to care about them any more than anyone else in their life did.   
“Uh… sorry, not that there’s anything wrong with you,” the boy hurriedly said to correct himself, his cheeks flushing as he actually looked at Remus for the first time. “You seem… nice. I just. I gotta go.”  
“Wait,” Remus blurted out as the boy seemed to look like he was going to run away. He stopped in his tracks, suspiciously looking at Remus. “W...Why do you keep running?” they asked, remembering how many times they had gotten a glimpse of him before he had disappeared, having somehow managed to wake himself up - likely through lucid dreaming. The fact that he wasn’t waking himself up right now either meant he couldn’t do that anymore, he wanted to talk, or he was too exhausted to be able to wake up.   
Either way, Remus needed to talk to him.   
He shook his head, not wanting to answer.   
“My name is Remus,” they said, trying out a different approach. “I am 19 years old, I am a freshman in college, and my pronouns are they/them. How about you?”  
The other blinked in confusion, staring at Remus like they were crazy. Which… made sense. They were treating him like he was an active shooter and they were trying to get away from his gunpoint. But they just needed to keep his attention. Needed to get to know something - anything - about the boy they were supposed to love.   
“My name is Vir… you can just call me V. 18, senior in high school, he/him. Can I go now?”  
V. It was a name that suited him. Short and mysterious. Remus loved a mystery.   
“Good, thank you. Now, why do you keep running, V?”  
V paused, looking around either like he was afraid something was coming, or like he was looking for a way out. Either way, it made Remus’s stomach sink. What was so wrong that was making his soulmate not want to be around him.   
“Please don’t wake yourself up,” Remus murmured just loud enough for the other to hear, taking a hesitant step towards him. Judging from the panicked look on V’s face, that was exactly what he had been planning to do.   
“I… I can’t do this. Not right now.”  
“Why not?” they took another step, feeling a little daring now that V hadn’t immediately run away. They hated this. They hated having to be so cautious around V, but they knew that they just had to do what they had to do.   
“I just can’t.”   
Remus took the last step between the two of them. V looked up at them with wide eyes. “Why haven’t I seen you in years?”  
“Remus--”  
“What did I do wrong?”  
“Re--”  
“Why do you keep leaving?”   
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, and in a split second, his form was replaced with a greyish purple smoke before disappearing. He’d woken himself up.   
Remus gritted their teeth and nearly screamed in frustration. They rose their hands up to their head, taking hold of their hair and pulling it as though they were going to rip it from its roots. They had come so close. They had had their soulmate right in front of them for the first time in their life, and now he was just… gone.   
Remus sank to sit on the floor of the dreamscape with a groan.   
He was never going to find love, was he?


End file.
